Inner House case concerning Glasgow City Council’s liability for damage caused to an Indian restaurant on the ground floor of a tenement building following the Council’s demolition of the floors above.

The Council had carried out the demolition work under s13 of the Building Scotland Act 1959 and argued that they should be free of responsibility for the collapse as, after the works had been completed, they had written to the restaurant owners indicating that future maintenance of the structure would be their responsibility. However, in the Outer House, the temporary judge had found that, whilst the Council had initially acted under the 1959 Act, after it had made the decision to demolish part of the building, a relationship had been created between them and the neighbouring proprietors that gave rise to a common law duty of care. The Council had carried out the demolition without carrying out gable stabilisation works, without which, it knew would there would be a material risk of harm to people or property in the vicinity of the wall. There was no evidence of the restaurant owners having been advised that the exposed wall lacked stability and they were entitled to assume that the Council had carried out the demolition works in a manner that did not create a new structural instability. As a result, the Council was found to be in breach of its duty.

The Inner House dismissed the Council’s appeal, finding there to be no error in the temporary judge’s decision. The duty breached was not a breach of statutory duty nor a failure of duty of care in the manner in which the Council exercised their statutory discretion to carry out the works. Rather it was a purely operational duty arising after the decision to carry out the demolition works was made: i.e. a duty not to create a reasonably foreseeable risk of harm by reason of the way in which the Council carried out the works.

The full judgement is available from Scottish Courts here.

All of our property and conveyancing case summaries are contained in the LKS Property and Conveyancing Casebook here.